the fear of falling
by l0ngl0st
Summary: Keith can pull off a downward spiral. It's the kind of maneuver he does in his sleep. / Keith backstory, Voltron: Legendary Defender-verse. Oneshot.


**A/N:** I'm working solely off of what we got in the Netflix show + the really brief character bios, so sorry if this all gets tossed out the window come Season 2. _But,_ seeing as the ending of Season 1 CHUCKED US OFF A FREAKING CLIFF, I'm gonna indulge myself.

* * *

Keith comes to the Galaxy Garrison with one knife, five books, and a jacket.

The knife, he is learning to wield. The books, he has read six times each. The jacket is too big, but he'll grow into it.

Four boys, two bunks. A baseball whizzes past him when he enters the room and Keith stops short in the doorway as one of the boys jumps to his feet, tawny-haired and freckled.

"You must be Keith!" he says, extending a hand. When Keith makes no move to set down the cardboard box in his arms, the other boy drops the gesture. "I'm Clay, that's Max, that's Ernest," he motions instead, pointing to each occupant in turn. "I hope you don't mind that I, uh, went ahead and claimed the bottom bunk. It's just that there's no railing on the top and that drop—"

"It's fine," Keith says, already climbing. "I'm not afraid of falling."

o.O.o

 _Too young_ is what they said, when they first put him in the children's home. But he had hardly been the youngest. There had been Kamila, four years old, who wouldn't outgrow sucking her thumb until she turned seven. Jamie, five, who somehow wore a hole in all his socks. Keith had been eight, standing on the doorstep on that chilly December night as three adults hunched over him, murmuring amongst themselves _we'll make space, of course,_ and _what a tragedy,_ and _too young, poor thing,_ and Keith had thought, angrily, that there was no such thing as being _old enough_ to become an orphan.

(Later, when he turned fourteen, he would become _too old_ for the home, and they'd ship him off to Garrison.)

o.O.o

On his third night, he sneaks onto the roof.

The lack of cloud cover allows the moonlight and the starlight to wash the surrounding desert in a bluish glow. At ten o'clock, the Garrison's main gate slides open. Five rovers roll out onto the sand, their lights swiveling as they begin their practice maneuvers. Two of the rovers peel off from the main group, heading into the distance to get soil and water samples for that week's lesson on habitat analysis.

Keith stretches out on his side, the metal of the roof cool against his cheek. At eleven, the three rovers finish their exercises and reenter the compound, their treads chugging happily along.

 _One, two, three, four, five._

He keeps his eyes on the horizon and waits until the other two make it home.

o.O.o

"For this lesson, Senior Flight Cadet Takashi Shiro will be piloting the flight simulator. The rest of you will take turns, two at a time, as passengers, so you can get a feel for what future simulations will be like."

Senior Flight Cadet Shiro stands at attention, arms held behind his back. His gaze holds none of the smugness that some of the other senior cadets have, especially when they're throwing their weight around in the mess hall. There's a steady confidence to him that makes Keith straighten, slightly, with a sudden need to measure up.

"Either of you been in a plane like this before?" Shiro asks when it's Keith and Clay's turn, as the two of them strap themselves in.

"Once," Clay answers, already looking queasy.

"No." Keith shakes his head.

"Well, here we go, then. Just sit back and enjoy the ride."

The machine powers up with a rattle, the buckles tightening across Keith's chest as he's jerked slightly forward by the launch. And then they're live, the simulator's main screen overtaken by the brilliant reds and oranges of a volcanic landscape.

"Io?" Clay guesses, clutching the arms of his chair.

Shiro nods. "The most volcanically active body in the solar system. Highly unlikely that we'd ever send any manned missions there, but it makes for an exciting training terrain." The capsule jerks as he turns them sideways, just in time to slice past an erupting stream of lava from their right.

"Sulfur cloud detected. Visibility impaired," intones the simulation as a yellow cloud blossoms across the screen, obscuring their view.

A darker shadow looms in the bottom corner for the briefest moment before disappearing again.

"On your left!" Keith yells in warning, but Shiro is already directing the plane away from the rock column, unruffled.

He looks over his shoulder, acknowledging Keith with a grin. "Good eye."

Clay, meanwhile, has closed his eyes, murmuring to himself, _"It's just a simulation, it's just a simulation."_

But it's _not_ just a simulation, to Keith. There's an artistry to the way Shiro manipulates the controls: the way he works the stick as if it's an extension of himself, how his hand spans several buttons at a time, accounting for altitude, monitoring vitals. Keith's been in the g-force capsule, but that was just a dizzy blur, purposeless motion, around and around and around. Flying a plane—the dips, the dives, the jolts—is a rooted sort of freedom. To be a metal body hurtling through the air, encased in the promise of deliverance from point A to point B but left to your own devices on how exactly to get there is, Keith decides, not such a bad idea.

But he isn't sure how to voice his revelation. Not until the flight finally ends and Shiro turns to him and asks, "How are you feeling?" He tilts his head toward Clay, who has gone green in the face. "It's not for everyone."

"No, I think…" Keith swallows, drinking in the glow of the cockpit, the sleek black gleam of the throttle, the light in Shiro's eyes. "I think I'm right where I'm supposed to be."

o.O.o

Two days later, instead of going to the roof after dinner, he heads to the flight simulator room instead.

And runs smack dab into Shiro's chest.

"Going somewhere, cadet?" asks the older boy, raising an eyebrow.

Keith's face warms. "I was just…" he trails off, fumbling. He's never been very good at lying. At the children's home, his usual method of evasion was clamming up until people left him alone, and it works well at Garrison for the most part, too, where people give up if they don't get a rise out of you within a minute.

Not that anyone bothers him much, nowadays. Whispers have spread about how he sleeps with a knife. Part of Keith wants to explain that there are other reasons for someone to sleep with a blade, besides wanting to cut people open on it—

" _Come here, Keith, feel the balance on this." Larger hands, wrapped around his own—_

But in the end, they are memories he guards fiercely. These are the things Keith keeps close to his chest: his mother's smile, his father's knife.

"Seeing if you could get another pass at the flight simulator," Shiro guesses, breaking Keith from his reverie.

"I'm…" Keith clenches his jaw before deciding to fess up. "Yes."

"Keith, was it?"

Keith's head snaps up and he nods, slowly. Warily.

"Well, Keith, I'm not sure if you know this, but junior cadets aren't allowed to enter the flight simulator without supervision," Shiro informs gently.

"Oh." Keith's shoulders sag; he tries to disguise his disappointment by turning his face away from Shiro, chin jutting out slightly. "That's fine."

"Now, luckily for you, a senior cadet qualifies as a supervisor."

Keith freezes. "You'd…do that?"

"Why not?" Shiro answers easily, starting back down the hallway. Keith falls into step behind him. "Your class is scheduled to get an official walkthrough next week, anyways. There's no shame in studying ahead."

The flight capsule feels roomier with just the two of them. Keith slides into the pilot seat, watching as the lights flicker on overhead. Shiro leans over him, pointing out controls.

"The computer handles most of it, so all you have to worry about is the control wheel and the throttle," he indicates, hands hovering over Keith's in demonstration.

"I think I've got it."

"If you say so." Shiro types in some sort of directions on one of the panels before making his way to the back, buckling himself in. "We'll start easy."

The plane comes to life around them with a rumble. Keith can feel the machinery whirring around him, the power at his command. He angles the nose upwards, increases the throttle—

" _Whoa."_

"Easy, there," chuckles Shiro, as the plane lurches. "It's harder than it looks."

"I've got this," Keith says, determined, getting a feel for the controls as he straightens out. Outside the cockpit, the scenery is blue sky and white clouds for miles; Keith turns the wheel slightly, reveling in the plane's response.

Behind him, Shiro is talking wind speeds and keeping the nose level, technicalities that Keith will take down later, but for now it's just him in the air, weightless but grounded, stomach lurching pleasantly and veins thrumming with adrenaline. This is the kind of thrill he hasn't felt in ages, not since he was seven and being spun around while dangling upside down, legs hooked over his dad's shoulders, his mom half-laughing, half-warning in the background—" _Honey, if you drop him_ —"

The blaring red _SIMULATION FAILED_ jerks him out of his thoughts. The fall back into reality is jarring, like running down an open stretch of road before suddenly smashing into a wall. Keith blinks, hands sliding from the wheel.

Shiro is at his side, already typing another sequence into the computer. "Don't worry about it too much," he reassures, taking in the stricken look on Keith's face. "Everybody fails their first. You up for another one?"

o.O.o

Keith passes his first flight assessment with, the instructor grins, _flying_ colors.

It's the happiest he's felt in years.

o.O.o

Clay is chewing a piece of beef loudly and Keith is going over flight maneuvers and aerodynamics in his head when a group of senior cadets enters the mess hall, grabbing food trays from the neatly piled stacks in the back.

Without meaning to, Keith's eyes seek out Shiro. He finds the older boy laughing at some joke made by the guy in front of him in line, and a strange prickle runs over Keith's skin, half-jealousy, half-longing.

"I hear he's being promoted to pilot officer next year."

"Who?"

"Shiro," indicates Clay. "That _is_ who you were looking at, right?"

"Hm," Keith grunts noncommittally.

"He's a pretty cool dude."

"Yeah," says Keith, focusing intensely on the piece of lettuce speared by his fork. "Cool."

o.O.o

No one is surprised when Keith gets declared fighter class. A plane is something else in his hands. A weapon, sure, but also an instrument of art.

 _Come here, Keith, feel the balance on this._

See how the wing can be a blade. The way it slices through the air.

 _I know, Dad. I know._

o.O.o

"So what's the deal with that jacket?" Clay asks one night, gesturing to the red leather draped over the bedpost. "You never wear it."

Keith doesn't have a lot of clothes that he considers his own. At the children's home, they wore whatever got handed down to them, until the clothes either became worn beyond repair or lasted long enough to be handed down to someone else. The jacket is a holdover from a particularly successful clothing drive when he was twelve; he'd staked a claim to it even though it was four sizes too big, hoping to grow into it eventually.

Right now, though, he's still a fifteen-year old with bony shoulders and the occasional sullen mood.

"It's mine," is all he says, and leaves it at that.

o.O.o

When he's sixteen, Keith decides to take the "fighter" part of his fighter pilot role seriously.

Clay laughs when Keith asks about possible sparring partners. "I just," he says, leaning back on his hands and tilting his head, "always assumed that you _already_ knew how to fight. You have that look to you, you know?"

Keith doesn't know. He's started to grow his hair long, curling around his ears and at the nape of his neck. He stays up late reading aeronautic manuals and watching the rovers to make sure they all return on schedule. There's a tiredness around his mouth that a lot of people mistake for tightness. After class, he disappears, usually to the flight simulator or the gym. The girls giggle and say _mysterious;_ the guys just think _asshole._

And it's not that Keith is angry; he hung up his anger a long time ago, right next to his jacket. He's just _restless._ The flight simulator is no longer enough. He still hasn't been approved to handle a real plane without supervision, when all he wants is to jet off into the red sands of the desert, just fly and fly without anyone to answer to, anyone rattling off objectives that he has to complete. So hand-to-hand combat seems like the next best thing, a new instrument to get the hang of: his own body.

He gets a rush, feeling the rawness of his knuckles after the first few times at a punching bag. But after that, he longs for a partner. It's like flying solo; people think it's only the pilot, but the plane is part of the dialogue—it requires attention, give-and-take. That's the sort of conversation Keith seeks out now. His classmates think of him as a lone wolf, but most of the time he's just lonely.

And it's no surprise that it's Shiro, once more, who comes to the rescue.

"Your stance is off-center," he points out one day, leaning against the wall.

Keith lets the punching bag swing back and forth as he backs up, wiping sweat from his brow.

"I heard you got promoted."

"I did. And I heard you're at the top of your class."

Keith shrugs, looks at the ground. "I don't fly for the rankings."

"Still." Shiro places a hand on the punching bag, steadying it. "If you keep it up, you could be where I am in a few years."

"Are they really thinking of letting you pilot the Kerberos mission?"

"It's a possibility."

"Pluto," Keith swallows. "That's…far."

"It is." Shiro tilts his head, regards him in the fluorescent lighting of the gym. "Now come on, let's see what you've got."

"What?"

"See if you can land a punch on me," says Shiro, coming to stand before him.

"O-okay," says Keith. He settles back on his haunches, sizing Shiro up before striking out halfheartedly.

Shiro catches his fist easily, raising an eyebrow. "Relax, Keith. You're not going to hurt me."

The gauntlet thrown down, they start to circle each other on the mat. Keith tries to look at Shiro's defense the way he eyes new terrain from his pilot's cockpit, identifying spaces he can slip past, openings he can squeeze through. _Punch. Block. Punch. Block._ There's a deadening rhythm to it, but at the same time Keith's senses are heightened. When Shiro dances back from yet another block, he drops his hands from his face and Keith seizes upon the moment, swinging—

Shiro ducks under it and gets his arms under Keith's armpits, pinning him in a full nelson.

Keith flails, to no avail. "Mercy," he half-laughs, half-wheezes, chest rising and falling.

Stepping away, Shiro pushes Keith's head forward slightly and ruffles his hair. "Not bad." His own hair is dark at the nape with a coating of sweat; Shiro sighs, the sound full of the satisfaction that comes from a good workout. "Now what do you say you and I grab something to eat?"

Keith lights up. "I'd like that."

o.O.o

When Keith is seventeen, Takashi Shiro, pilot of the Kerberos mission, goes missing.

o.O.o

 _I'm not afraid of falling,_ Keith had said when he first came to the Garrison.

What'd he meant was: he wasn't afraid of the impact, of hitting the ground. Because that kind of pain was finite. There was an end to it; you could pick yourself back up.

But the night he watches the broadcast, sees Shiro's face on the TV alongside the two scientists accompanying him and reads the headline— _KERBEROS MISSION DISAPPEARS: PILOT ERROR—_ it's like he's eight-years-old and hearing the news of his parents' death all over again; the ground disappears from beneath him and he's falling, falling, falling, with no end in sight.

o.O.o

"You want to explain to me why you haven't been in class for the past two weeks?"

The file hits the commander's desk with a loud _slap._ Keith tries not to flinch at the sound. Nowadays, they keep everything on the online database; the commander must have personally pulled down his data and put it into a folder just to get this effect, and Keith's mouth curls slightly at the thought.

"The instructors tell me you're one of our best. But you want to know something, kid?"

Keith bristles. He doesn't respond.

"Skill doesn't mean squat if it doesn't have discipline. We're here to train proper pilots, not waste our time trying to wrangle hotshots into line."

 _Keep it up,_ Shiro had said, _and you could be where I am in a few years._

 _And where is that?_ Keith wonders. Lost on some distant moon, brushed under the rug by everyone at home? The reports keep saying "pilot error," but Keith has always trusted his gut. He tries to sneak into the record offices while everyone's in class, but he's no hacker. All he has is an aching feeling and a need to put a finger on something, anything, to explain the real reasons behind the Kerberos mission's failure.

( _Missing_ is the not the same as _dead._ The rovers leave and return every night. _Onetwothreefourfive._ He has to believe in that, if anything.)

"Get it under control, cadet," the commander says. "Or get out."

o.O.o

Keith can pull off a downward spiral. It's the kind of maneuver he does in his sleep.

o.O.o

When they bring him in front of the board for disciplinary action, the constant question is _how._

 _How_ did he manage to sneak into the airplane hangar. _How_ did he manage to maneuver the airplane out for what one panel member will term " _an egocentric joyride."_ _How_ did he return safely in one piece, despite never having been cleared for unsupervised flight with one of the real planes before?

Nobody asks him _why._ Keith isn't sure he'd have been able to answer, if they had, but it would probably have gone something like this: he'd have told them about intentionally nosediving. The lurch in his stomach, the bottoming out. And then he'd have told them about pulling out of the maneuver at that last moment, so close to crashing and burning—the pulse pounding in his ears and the knowledge that even though there was so much else he hadn't been able to save, at least he had himself. That this was the last measure of control he had over anything in his life.

But the panel looks at him and just sees an angry seventeen-year-old boy with words he doesn't know how to use. They see his clenched fists and think _dangerous, volatile,_ when he's just trying to keep his fingers from shaking. And Keith looks back at them and knows that these four walls are no longer enough, that he must move on from here if he's ever going to taste real flight or real answers.

Keith leaves the Galaxy Garrison with one knife, eight books, and a jacket.

The knife, he has learned how to wield. The three new books, he has taken from the Garrison's library.

The jacket finally fits.

o.O.o

He gets by taking odd jobs in town and making the occasional delivery. He finds a place farther out, miles past the outskirts, and makes it his own. Cardboard boxes stacked in a corner. A ratty blanket thrown over the couch.

He's out over some scenic vista when he first picks up on the energy flare—the needle on his dashboard starts going haywire, the plane shuddering under his hands.

It might not be the answer to everything, but it's enough.

Keith throws himself into his new investigation. He gets by on five hours of sleep and a single-minded focus. Back at the Garrison, people had shaken their heads at him. They'd said things like _he flies just for the sake of it,_ wondered what he was actually going to do with his life, called him "directionless." But even compasses spin wildly, until they find north.

o.O.o

Keith has always had a particular patience for maps. He makes some of his own, in those initial journeys into the caves. He jots down all sorts of notes, gets acquainted with the outlines of the carved lions in sunlight, in starlight. There's a purposefulness to them he admires, even if he can't uncover the full story.

Back at his home—because he's started thinking of it as that, now, _his_ and _home_ —he puts his different pieces on corkboard, tries to link them together. He runs strings between points, around pushpins. It's like a muddled flight pattern, he thinks; if he could only untangle it, he could get from point A to point B. There and back. He's lost three of the people closest to him to one-way trips, but no more. Keith is done with being lost, with losing things. It's time he found something, for a change.

o.O.o

When Keith is eighteen, Takashi Shiro returns to Earth with a prosthetic arm.

When Keith is eighteen, he becomes caught up in a galactic battle he'd never even imagined the scale of.

When Keith is eighteen, he almost dies.

o.O.o

The decision to open the belly of the ship is a desperate one. The Red Lion is unresponsive, but all Keith knows is a fiery sense of possessiveness. _You won't get this,_ he tells the Galra, and hits the button, watches as the ground disappears from underneath them—from underneath _him_ —for yet another time in his life.

The soldiers are sucked out into space in the blink of an eye. Keith strains against the vacuum force, his body stretched out, arm straining. Behind him yawns the empty chasm of space, a hungry mouth, while the Red Lion bears witness to the whole scene, a 10,000 year old force of alien power passing judgment on the puny human before it. Its yellow eyes are unlit. Cold.

 _Please,_ Keith thinks, scrabbling. _This can't be how it ends._

A rod comes down, hard, on his fingers. He lets go.

The tumble, he can deal with. Head over feet over head, spinning like a rag doll. He's faced it all in the g-force simulator. But then the violent motion ends and the weightlessness kicks in and he's alone, panicked gasps heavy in his ears and nothing but darkness for miles.

Being adrift in space is its own kind of falling—a falling without end.

 _I'm scared,_ Keith admits.

And then, out of nowhere, sleek and beautiful and more _alive_ than Keith has known any machine to be, the Red Lion emerges, its dark jaws open wide as a memory, as a promise waiting to be fulfilled—

— _He is in a field, spinning dizzily, looking at the world from upside down. His hair is too long but his mother has promised to cut it for him and he feels like he's falling except he's not, because his father's hands are locked around his ankles, warm and solid and—_

— _Don't worry, Keith. I've got you._

 _I know._


End file.
